In 2016 I oversaw the development of a proof-of-concept version of The Washington Post’s mobile website built on Google’s new Progressive Web App (PWA) technology. It was demoed at Google I/O that year.

Even though it was a public beta we did not advertise it at all. Still, it suddenly had more than 50,000 users and the usage and engagement numbers were high. The improved performance of the site and offline storage made browsing stories much easier.

I let a team to convert our entire website to PWA but we first had to solve for advertising. PWA technology had no solution for this so my colleague Jarrod Dicker created our own technology called Zeus to optimize display ads on our site. Read more on Zeus here.

You can read more on the launch of PWA in The Wall Street Journal.